Sybil Exposed (2 page)
Authors: Debbie Nathan
Free Press
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Copyright © 2011 by Debbie Nathan
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First Free Press hardcover edition October 2011
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To my own blessed sisterhood:
Anita Nathan Beckenstein
Barbara Nathan Katz
Miriam Nathan Lerner
CHAPTER 6: PROFESSOR SCHREIBER
I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
—Emily Dickinson
W
HAT ABOUT MAMMA?” THE WOMAN
psychiatrist asks her patient, another woman, who is lying on a divan in the early 1960s. “What’s mamma been doing to you, dear? I know she’s given you the enemas,” the psychiatrist continues. “And filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe… . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now.”
“My mommy,” the patient answers groggily. She is in a hypnotic trance, induced with the help of the psychiatrist.
“Yes.”
“My mommy said I was bad, and … my lips were too big like a nigger’s … she slapped me … with her knuckles … she said don’t tell Daddy. She said to keep my mouth shut.”
“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist answers. “Do you want to know something, Sweety? I’m stronger than mother.”
1
The transcript of this long ago conversation is stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City. The college’s library houses a cramped room called Special Collections, whose walls are adorned with lithographs of a gangster jumping to his death from a window on Coney Island, and prisoners rotting in cells at Sing Sing. Not far from the lithographs hangs a black-and-white photograph of John Jay’s staff in the 1960s, peopled by
over two dozen men and five women. One of the women wears a serious expression and a plain, woolen coat. “Interesting, that coat,” comments a librarian. “It’s from before she got rich. Afterward, it was nothing but mink for her. Full-length mink.”
The woman who got rich was Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of
Sybil
, the blockbuster book from the 1970s about the woman with sixteen personalities.
Sybil
first went on sale in 1973, and soon it was moving off the shelves as briskly as the Bible. Within four years it had sold over six million copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands more worldwide. A television adaptation was broadcast in 1976 and seen then by a fifth of the American population. The book is still in print and the TV drama has become a classic. Both versions were instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple personality disorder, or MPD. Sybil also created a new way for millions of people—most of them women—to think about their memories, their families, and their capabilities, even when they were psychologically normal, without a hint of MPD.
To create the book which caused this phenomenon, Schreiber collaborated with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist in the transcript who asks, “What about mamma?”—and with Wilbur’s patient, whose real name Schreiber changed in her book to the pseudonym Sybil Dorsett. The two women helped Schreiber by giving her records of Sybil’s therapy, including thousands of pages of treatment notes, patient diaries, and transcripts of sessions that had been tape-recorded over a period of eleven years. Schreiber was a pack rat who never threw away a scrap. After she died in the late 1980s, her papers, including the Sybil therapy material, were archived at John Jay.
For a decade after Schreiber’s death, Sybil’s real name and whereabouts were unknown to the public, and to protect her privacy, librarians sealed her therapy records. But in 1998, two researchers accidentally discovered a piece of paper that revealed her real identity and, following up on that information, they learned that she was dead. The John Jay papers were unsealed, and today researchers can find disturbing conversations in them, such as the hypnotherapy session just cited. Many describe how Sybil’s mother perpetrated sexual assaults and other atrocities on her when she was as young as three years old—traumas so horrible that the little girl was said to have pushed them out of her consciousness for decades, until she
saw a psychiatrist. “Mamma was a bad mamma,” Dr. Wilbur declares in the transcripts. “I can help you remember.”
But countless other records suggest that the outrages Sybil recalled never happened at all. Dr. Wilbur had helped her patient do
something
, these records suggest, and for a very long period of time. But whatever that behavior was, it can hardly be called remembering. What was it, then? And why did it enthrall not just psychiatrists in charge of creating new diagnoses, but ordinary people all over the world—and especially women?
Is there anyone in America who does not remember what started it all? Just in case, here is the abridged version of
Sybil.
One cold day in winter 1956, a shy and painfully anorexic graduate student in the pre-med department at Columbia University stands outside her chemistry classroom waiting for the elevator. The next thing she knows, she is on a freezing, snow-swept street in a city she doesn’t recognize. Eventually she figures out it’s Philadelphia, and that between the elevator and the snow five days have passed, days which for the young woman—whose name is Sybil Dorsett—are an utter blank. Sybil catches a train back to New York to see Dr. Wilbur, her steely but superbly kind and caring Park Avenue psychoanalyst. Dr. Wilbur mothers, medicates, and hypnotizes her patient, tirelessly attempting to dredge up memories of the forgotten childhood trauma which she assumes provokes Sybil’s flights to other cities.
The Philadelphia trip is not the first time Sybil’s mind has shattered. Though she doesn’t realize it, she is possessed by so many inner personalities that they need a family tree to keep themselves straight. There are a whimpering toddler, a depressed grandmother, a pair of unruly, prepubes-cent boys, and two saucy grade school girls named Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann. With unpredictable frequency, these “alters” take turns suppressing Sybil’s main personality as they emerge to control her behavior in chilling ways. A young female personality keeps trying to commit suicide—which would, of course, kill Sybil. The toddler cowers under furniture, sobbing with incoherent terror.
This psychic splitting has been going on since Sybil was three, but no one around her realized it, though the little girl’s behavior was often
puzzling. In fifth grade she suddenly forgot how to do arithmetic. She doesn’t know it, but she forgot her multiplication tables because an alter personality named Peggy Lou took over her body at age nine and attended school in Sybil’s place. Then, two grades later, Peggy Lou suddenly vanished, leaving Sybil ignorant of everything her alter had learned.
At the time the book begins, Sybil has no idea she has alters. All she knows is that she dissociates—or “loses time,” as she puts it. She ends up in strange places without the slightest idea how she got there. She discovers dresses in her closet that are not her style and which she does not remember buying. She finds herself chatting intimately with people she has no recollection of ever having met.
Dr. Wilbur decides that the cause of this puzzling illness is some terrible thing done to Sybil during childhood, the memory of which she walled off into other personalities so that she would not have to deal with the pain. But what, exactly, happened? That’s what, together, they need to figure out so that Sybil can “integrate” her personalities and be whole again. The only way to do that is for Sybil to remember the trauma, and Dr. Wilbur must help.
Dr. Wilbur puts Sybil into drug-induced and hypnotic trances that finally cause her to remember. The trauma she suffered as a young child turns out to have been abuse—barbaric, gothic, grotesque beyond imagination—inflicted by her psychotic mother, Hattie Dorsett. Hattie once tried to suffocate four-year-old Sybil by locking her into a box filled with grain. Other times, she made her daughter watch as she defecated on neighbors’ lawns, held lesbian orgies in the woods with teenagers, and fondled the genitals of babies. If all this weren’t enough to destroy a child’s psyche, Hattie regularly hung preschooler Sybil by the ankles above a kitchen table, raped her with household utensils, gave her ice-water enemas, and tied her under the piano while banging out crazed versions of Beethoven and Chopin.
Could these nightmare memories, recovered so many years after the crimes supposedly happened, really be true? Yes, says the book—undoubtedly. One chapter has Dr. Wilbur interrogating Sybil’s quiet, colorless father about the family’s past. Mr. Dorsett admits that his wife—by now long dead—was a “nervous” woman. Hemming and hawing, he allows that Hattie could have tortured her daughter without his or anyone else’s noticing.
Now, decades after the abuse and the psychic splitting, Sybil’s only hope
for cure is her kindly psychoanalyst. Dr. Wilbur does not disappoint. After eleven years and hundreds of pages of heroic ministrations, she convinces all the alter personalities to integrate into a united self. As Sybil lies on Dr. Wilbur’s couch, hypnotized, the babies, little boys, and teenagers all grow into adults within minutes, and they dutifully fold back into Sybil’s consciousness, promising never to “come out” again. The grown-up alters make a similar pact. Sybil’s broken mind is mended; she vanquishes the hell of her mother’s mistreatment and finally becomes a whole person. End of story. Except that after the integration, Dr. Wilbur introduces Sybil to New York City writer Flora Rheta Schrieber. The three women decide to write a book together, the better to help others cope with their mental health problems.